Abstract: It has been argued recently that parton showers based on colour dipolesconflict with collinear factorization and do not lead to the correct DGLAPequation. We show that this conclusion is based on an inappropriate assumption,namely the choice of the gluon energy as evolution variable. We further shownumerically that Monte Carlo programs based on dipole showers with -infraredsensible- evolution variables reproduce the DGLAP equation both in asymptoticform as well as in comparison to the leading behaviour of second-order QCDmatrix elements.